


like a light came on

by kissmeinnewyork



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Gay, Kissing, Romance, SO GAY, chips with yaz, hopeless fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 14:56:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16642397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kissmeinnewyork/pseuds/kissmeinnewyork
Summary: She's sick of her life story being so grand and epic. Sometimes she just wants chips with Yaz. (thirteen, yaz and kisses in sheffield drizzle.)





	like a light came on

**Author's Note:**

> oof so im back in my doctor who stanning phase and im absolute TRASH for these two
> 
> kudos and comments appreciated
> 
> this is just short, but hopefully longer things to come

The Doctor has fallen in love a hundred times before.

It’s an occupational hazard—it walks hand in hand with being over two thousand, having fourteen different bodies, the endless ground she steps on and the different air she breathes. She falls in love with smiles, heartbeats. The way hands feel in her own. The looks on faces as they stare into sunsets, red and yellow and burning orange blazing on some distant skyline. Sometimes she just falls in love with a voice, a word. Sometimes, _sometimes,_ she falls in love with what isn’t, what couldn’t, what shouldn’t. And that—that’s what’s the hardest. Falling in love with potential.

But falling in love, she considers, is a thousand times easier than _being_ in love.

The being part happens a lot less frequently. Mostly because she’s not really allowed to, or even wants to. She’s seen the end of so many of her love stories and outlived them all, which is telling in itself. In fact, she actively avoids all epic romances, ever since _everything,_ because being in love is beautiful until it ends.

(Oh, she’s sat in the ashes of forest fires often enough. Said goodbye and hello trudging through New Year’s snow a lifetime ago. Watched, helpless and chained, through lightning storms. Saw her longest and most loved friend turn her back away. And once, once, she just… _forgot_.)

She’s become so accustomed to her life being this mad, complex and grand thing that she just _overlooks_ that maybe it doesn’t always have to be that way. When she trudges through the eaves of the TARDIS in the hours her visitors rest she thinks of their lives—their desperately short lives, the way they flicker and fade like fireworks. She breathes on a window-pane and by the time the mist clears she’s burying them, mud cloying at her boots.

But, occasionally, there are very special people who flourish between breaths, who make whole years out of heartbeats and kisses and Christmas Eves, and she smiles when she thinks about how _human_ that is. She’s been feeling more and more like a human lately. Sometimes her two hearts feel like a solitary one, and it’s oddly freeing, like the chains that bind her to her relative immortality are collapsing.

Being with Yasmin makes her feel like she’s human. There had been a time where the mere thought would have made her _shudder,_ because as much as she likes these fragile little things she’s never wanted to be one of them—stood tall, proud, yet somehow broken, a monument amongst heads of unimportant mayflies, back in the sad and lonely days after her home was set alight.

But, oh, that feeling was so, so temporary. It crumbled like Gallifrey did. Even the memory of it disintegrates when Yasmin Khan drops a bag of chips into her hand, and she’s reminded of another nineteen year old girl who smiled at her a lifetime ago.

“Mr Latimer does the best chips in Sheffield,” Yasmin says, eyes brightening as she parts the paper, “They’re proper good.”

The Doctor takes her word for it, but for a moment, enjoys the way the bag warms her hands despite the late September chill. Takes in this perfect, minute pocket of her marathon existence. Chips with Yaz, the sky hazy with artificial light, silence punctured by trams and trains brushing past just outside Park Hill. There are exactly five hundred and fifty-six strides from Yaz’s front door to the Sheffield Station tram stop. She counted last night, once she’d dropped them all off, and she’d sat alone on one of the benches until the first tram passed again in the morning. She’d barely noticed the seconds passing.

There are very few situations, or people, that make her forget linear time. And that’s—that’s how she _knows._ That it’s happening again. Another pretty girl in an English city. Two thousand years should eliminate predictability, but instead it only becomes more prevalent.

“Yaz,” she begins, then trails off. Yaz blinks. Drops a chip into her mouth. “There’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. And there’s a lot of things I think about a lot, big head, you know, full of loads of stuff—like, I’ve been thinking about creating a ginger nut dispenser on the TARDIS because the custard cream one is probably my most epic invention yet, but…”

They pause under the yellowing glow of a flickering street lamp, their shadows dancing in the concrete in front of them. Yaz pauses thoughtfully. “Doctor?”

“Uh,” the Doctor groans, smile grimacing at her lips, “I’ve never been very good at this. Always been a bit oblivious, me. I’ve been—it’s sort of embarrassing really, and I do ramble, you know that. And that’s…part of it, actually, because you _let_ me ramble even if you definitely look like you don’t understand what I’m saying.”

Yaz’s lips curl at the corners. She’s not sure if that’s reassuring or not, she’s never been that good at reading people, not in this body. “Are you saying that you fancy me?”

The Doctor opens her mouth, looking around them in feigned nonchalance, trying to play it cool. Shoves her hands in her pockets, swinging back and forwards on her heels. “I mean…that’s very possible. If fancy means what I think it means.” She leans forward a little. “It does mean _like_ right? Like, _I want to go on dates with you_ like?”

“Yeah,” Yaz says, laughing, “Yeah, I think it does mean that.”

“Oh. Fab!” the Doctor says, rubbing her hands together, “Glad we got that out the way. My human slang is a bit rusty, but Ryan has been filling me in on what the young people are saying. Oh, by the way, he said that you knew some cool memes I could—“

Yaz cuts her off with a kiss, because sometimes—always—that’s the only way to get her to stop talking. Not that she’s complaining. Sometimes things are as simple as this.

 

 

 


End file.
